A NEW SCRIPT

22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time
Mk 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

When it comes to the subject of tradition, our attitudes can vary dramatically. Tradition does not only bring people together. Tradition also sets people apart. Tradition is like a script that dictates how we should act and behave. But what if a new script is proposed?

On the one hand, some of us have an affectionate loyalty, if not slavish subservience, to traditional ways of doing things. They feel secure when they adapt their own values and behavior to handed-down wisdom that creates and sustains the familiar. For them, there is no better guarantee that they are on the right track than that which comes from knowing they are treading along the path that many others have already taken. G. K. Chesterton once said, “Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors.” But he quickly added, “It is the democracy of the dead.”

On the other hand, there are those of us who feel choked by tradition. They want novelty, a fresh outlook on things, a new way of doing things. They are not satisfied with renovation. They want innovation. They want to be original. For them, too much tradition is, in truth, scared opinion. While they may consult tradition, they do not feel obliged to move within its defined parameters. W. S. Maughan remarked, “Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.”

In the Gospel today, the issue of tradition is raised against Jesus by His perennial critics, the scribes and the Pharisees. They accuse Him of breaking sacred tradition because He allows His disciples to eat without first washing their hands. It may amuse us to know that washing hands before eating is more than an issue of good hygiene for the Jews. For a Jew, not washing his hands before he eats numbers him not only among the physically unclean but also among the spiritually defiled. Because Jesus tolerates His disciples’ eating without first washing hands, He is, therefore, charged with disregard of the unwritten tradition of the elders.

In the written Law of the Jews, only priests are required to perform ceremonial washing before entering the sanctuary of the Temple. However, the requirement is eventually extended to every pious Jew. The ritual of hand-washing before eating becomes part of the unwritten tradition of legal interpretation and is regarded by the Pharisees and the scholars of the law to be as binding as the Law of Moses. It is but normal, therefore, that they expect Jesus, the wandering Rabbi, to share their view on the matter.

Jesus, however, quotes the prophet Isaiah against His critics to impress upon them and upon us today a lesson we quite often forget:

“This people honors me only with lip-service,
while their hearts are far from me.
The worship they offer me is worthless,
the doctrines they teach are only human regulations.
You put aside the commandment of God
to cling to human traditions.”

His motive is clear: Jesus wants to set people free from the burden of a stifling tradition that focuses on approved performance. His lesson is even clearer: When religious observance has no heart, it becomes a rubbish ritual.

Jesus takes the issue a step further and says, “Listen to me, all of you and understand. Nothing that goes into a man from outside can make him unclean; it is the things that come out of a man that make him unclean.” By saying so, Jesus declares all foods clean, a declaration that renders the whole concept of cushier meal a big baloney. As eating with unwashed hands is an imaginary defilement, as far as Jesus is concerned, so is eating food considered unclean by the Jews. Defilement is a matter of what comes from the heart. Jesus shifts the focus from personal hygiene to personal examination of conscience, from ritual washing to genuine worship, from dietary observance to moral living, from food to the human heart. Jesus is not interested in the condition of our hands before eating but in the condition of our hearts at every single moment of life. Our diet does not excite Him either. It is our heart that moves Him.

The stirrings of our hearts do not fail to hold Jesus’ attention. He is interested in our preoccupations that influence our personal choices and actual behavior. The territory within – with its complexity of emotions and desires – is where Jesus wants to venture into in each one of us. It is the same territory that He continuously remind us to examine and honestly face our real issues. Jesus knows too well that no external law can change our hearts, even if it makes us socially conform. Does He not also whisper to us, as He once proclaimed at the beginning of His public ministry, “Set your hearts first on the kingdom of God?” Only when our hearts are focused on God can we really experience what it means to be truly free without disregarding the essentials of tradition. Tradition should not script our every move. Jesus presents to us a new script, one that is written by the heart.